Coming soon – FAÇADISM: PRESERVE OR RENEW?, RIBA, 22 November 2016

On Tuesday 22 November I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion on façadism at RIBA, part of the events programme for their current exhibition We Live In The Officeby Giles Round. Other participants include Gillian Darley and Will Wiles.

Façades are interesting things. I’ve written before that ‘façades are for art historians’ by which I mean (or, rather, meant) that in buildings archaeology and built heritage, we put too much weight on principal elevations, architectural styles and architects’ intentions, so much . Archaeology is the stuff that happens behind them.

But also, façadism is an archaeologically fascinating phenomenon and one that needs to be understood and critiqued both to understand the nature of contemporary change in the built environment and to try to check the adverse impact of certain kinds of development on peoples’ lives.